The ruling should bring an end to a sensational 17-year legal saga that saw Knox and her Italian ex-boyfriend convicted and acquitted in flip-flop verdicts in 21-year-old Meredith Kercher's brutal murder, before being exonerated by the highest Cassation Court in 2015.
The slander conviction against Knox remained the last legal stain against her. It survived multiple appeals, and Knox was reconvicted on the charge in June after a European court ruling that Italy had violated her human rights cleared the way for a new trial.
Knox, now 37, will not attend the Cassation Court hearing, her defense lawyer Carlo Dalla Vedova said.
Even if the high court upholds the conviction and three-year sentence, Knox does not risk any more time she jail. She has already served nearly four years during the investigation, initial murder trial and first appeal. Knox said the aim is to clear her name of all criminal wrongdoing.
“Living with a false conviction is horrific, personally, psychologically, emotionally,'' she said on the podcast. “I'm fighting it, and we'll see what happens.”
Knox returned to the United States in 2011, after being freed by an appeals court in Perugia, and has established herself as a global campaigner for the wrongly convicted. She has a podcast with her husband and has a new memoir coming out titled, “Free: My Search for Meaning.”
Knox returned to Italy in June for the verdict in the slander trial, and Dalla Vedova said she was “very embittered” by the conviction.
Knox was a 20-year-old student in the central Italian university town of Perugia when Kercher was found stabbed to death on Nov. 2, 2007, in her bedroom in the apartment they shared with two Italian women.
The case made global headlines as suspicion quickly fell on Knox and her boyfriend of just days, Rafaelle Sollecito. After eight years of trial, including two appeals to Italy’s highest court, they were fully exonerated in the murder in 2015.
Another man, Rudy Hermann Guede of the Ivory Coast, was convicted of murder after his DNA was found at the crime scene. He was freed in 2021, after serving most of his 16-year sentence.
Knox faced an additional slander charge for accusing the Congolese owner of a bar where she worked of killing Kercher during a long night of questioning just days after his death. The European Court of Human Rights ruled that Italy violated Knox's human rights by failing to provide a lawyer and an adequate translator.
Italy’s high court ordered the new slander trial based on that ruling. It threw out two signed statements falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba in the murder, and directed the appellate court that the only evidence it could consider was a hand-written letter she wrote in English attempting to walk back the accusation.
However, the appellate court in its reasoning said that the four-page memo supported a slander finding.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Credit: AP